Music biopics usually cast a screen actor and teach them to sing. Maïmouna Doucouré’s film about Josephine Baker reverses the order: its star is a Grammy-winning singer whose reputation rests as much on dance, costume and reinvention as on her voice. The first official image shows StudioCanal leading with her transformation into Baker as it opens sales on the film.

StudioCanal and Bien ou Bien Productions unveiled the still of FKA twigs as Baker this week at the American Film Market, as The Hollywood Reporter first reported. She is perched on a dining table in a pink, beaded and fringed dress, striking one of Baker’s playful poses, her hair set in the close-cropped waves the entertainer made her signature. Twigs flashes a broad smile as she twists toward her audience, leaning into the mix of sensual glamour and mischievous physical wit that defined Baker on stage.

Doucouré wrote the screenplay with Olivier Lorelle. The film, which carries its subject’s name, follows Baker’s rise to international stardom in Paris and her later work with the French Resistance and the American civil rights movement. It is a change of scale for the director of Cuties and Hawa, two contemporary stories built around young girls in Paris.

Baker was born in St. Louis in 1906 and moved to Paris in 1925, where she became one of the defining entertainers of the Jazz Age. Her activism later saw her appear alongside Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington, and in 2021 she became the first Black woman inducted into France’s Panthéon. The production has the backing of her sons Jean-Claude Bouillon Baker and Brian Bouillon Baker, as well as the Rainbow Tribe, the multiracial family of 12 children she raised at her château in southwest France.

“I cannot wait to embody Josephine Baker, bringing her fight, her love, her losses, her talent and her heroism to the big screen,” Twigs said when her casting was announced in May. “She lives on in our hearts as a visionary, ground-breaking woman whose story is as powerful as it is relevant today.”

The casting lands in the same year she won her first Grammy, taking best dance/electronic album for Eusexua in February. Her screen work so far includes Alma Har’el’s Honey Boy, Rupert Sanders’ The Crow and David Lowery’s Mother Mary, in which she appears opposite Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel.

StudioCanal and Bien ou Bien Productions are producing, with CPB Films, Leyland Films and Dingie as associated producers. StudioCanal is handling worldwide sales and will release the film theatrically itself in France, the U.K., Germany, Italy, Benelux, Poland, Australia and New Zealand. No release date has been announced.

That list has no United States on it, so the story of the woman who left St. Louis to become a star in Paris still needs a buyer to bring it back to American screens.